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Follower-Slave of the Buddhadharma.
Have a PhD in History; but am currently unemployed, and have been underemployed and unemployed since receiving that doctorate degree.
Have traveled around the world and have lived in various cities across the world, mostly in Europe and in the Americas. Served four years in the US military as a non-combattant.

January 27, 1889 was the date of decision. The day started out quite nice and sunny for a rough winter in that beautiful, modernized city of Paris. Construction workers had almost completed the stunning Eiffel Tower for the upcoming Worlds Fair in October. Many French people thought there was a confidence in the air. France recently suffered terrible losses to Germany during the Franco-Prussian War, and then there was the Commune Civil War that followed in 1871.

About twenty years earlier, the late dictator, Napoleon III, had commissioned an architect to demolish most of the medieval winding streets that had made Paris so romantic. The city still had its charms though, even with its wide boulevards that could march whole armies to better exterminate recalcitrant revolutionaries. This urban project was the first successful modern gentrification undertaking. Also around this time, French artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals had become world-famous through producing works that displayed the modern trends of Impressionism, Realism and Symbolism.

But there was another rumbling in the air that day. A French general by the name of General Boulanger had become the talk of the nation. This great and honorable man seemed to have fortune on his side. He was ready to retake his beloved France with the movement that supported him to power. This opportune winter moment was the day for his sunny ‘coup d’état.’

That French term meant that this military adventurer and strongman had to seize the day, take over the state, become a new Caesar, dictator – and even a tyrant. General Boulanger won the election to the French Parliament, La Chambre des députés, but he couldn’t bear to sit among the corrupt deputies that most French citizens hated. His ‘political movement’ wanted him to declare himself President, lead the French Army to disband the corrupt Congress and win back territories that the Second German Empire, or Second Reich, had seized during the last war.

The corrupt French press could not resist him, and they transformed the general into a greater than life, ‘Hero of the Nation.’ But there was more to the man than his press persona. The political mobilization that supported him was the real power behind such a figure. A bizarre political cabal had already mobilized angry French citizens, mostly conservative ones, who saw their country turn into something they hated. The French Third Republic was quite corrupt and the ideals of French Revolution seemed to matter little to the ambitious band of politicians in Paris.

A movement coalesced between old Monarchists, (Boulanger even spoke to Napoleon’s exiled family living in Switzerland), devout Catholics, and militarists who wanted to see France avenge its humiliating defeat against Germany, and possibly even – defeat the great British Empire and complete Napoleon’s sacred dream of the ‘L’empire français universel.’

The Boulanger political deployment started off as a propaganda agitation campaign. It next moved into a street mode of action, and then resorted to selective violence against its political enemies. Now they had their symbol personified in a dignified general that showed his public face against the corrupt republic.

The problem with this social movement was that it did not represent the whole of the country. Courageous French intellectuals began to expose the shaded groups behind the Man, and especially the political alliances in the shadows that hated the ideals of the French Revolution, which most of the French population did still support.

With the exposures against him, General Boulanger got scared, lost his honor and courage, and he flaked out with his coup d’état. The scheming plotter in the costume of a French general would eventually kill himself just two years later. This political moment in French History became the Boulanger Affair. It represented the first modern populist-social movement of France. This movement attempted to destroy the country in order to save it.

Populist-fascist social movements are the most powerful hegemonic political blocks in modern democratic countries. They emerge when the entire democratic system begins to rot from the inside. Corruption becomes rampant, the legislature transforms into paid off hacks, and the government turns into another tyrannical regime. Anger increases substantially through the citizenry, and especially among the male population. The term populism signifies a political movement geared for a large section of the people, or the ‘nation.’

Populist-fascist movements grab their power through unifying angry elite institutions with angry social movements, most often religious ones. Religious social movements work wonderfully because they have the best social meeting spaces: churches, mosques, synagogues and temples. Through uniting powerful people with powerful social movements, the populist-fascist social movements transcend into optimum political forces or complete counter-hegemonic blocks against the state – while making alliances with other scheming sections of the state. These contradictions are not apparent among the street level activists.

Once the populist-social alliances increase their organizing into mobilizations, they move powerfully into the political field, through both agitation and violence. They ultimately hope to seize the state in order to murder their enemies. They lost in 1880s in France, but they almost won about a hundred years later in the United States.

America in the mid 1980s and into the 90s was a volatile place. Right-wing intellectuals have often talked about that time in history as a type of ‘restoration’ under President Reagan – but it was anything like that. What really happened was that elements of the Republican Party, implying certain members of the old guard that surrounded Nixon, the disgraced former president, decided to form a powerful political alliance, or a new hegemonic block. This block would emerge as a powerful force in dividing the Democratic party electorate, which allowed that party to control the US Congress for over twenty years.

First, they forged an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, which had about a quarter of the US population. The Catholic Church was always the strange Christian group looking on the outside compared to the standard Mainline Protestant Churches of America, such as the Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopalians. But now they had a substantial part of the population, (about one quarter), and with special thanks to President Reagan allowing a Vatican ambassador to D.C. and signing the Immigration Reform Act into law – the first dice was cast.

Later, right-wing activists helped this base achieve even greater mobilization and power. The conservative activists in the Catholic Church set up the Moral Majority Organization using a Baptist political-preacher, (from the South), as a front man, named Jerry Falwell. Catholic conservatives would use this same strategy through mobilizing other single issue front group-crusades, such as fighting against the separation between Church and State, anti-homosexuality, anti-pornography, anti-teenage rebellion, anti-illegal drugs, anti-sex education, exposing Satanism in rock music and popular culture, and most importantly, anti-abortion.

Those particular political mobilizations proceeded into the street agitations. The single issue that could unite them was abortion. Phony anti-abortion evangelists, or disguised Catholic preachers, entered the parachurch world of Evangelicals that met in rented spaces, such as movie theaters, Mainline Protestant churches and even inside Masonic halls! These religious movements represented the Charismatic types that ‘spoke in tongues,’ or unintelligible gibberish, fell on the floor through being ‘slain in the spirit’; while selected parishioners blurted out prophetic statements during the worship, and the church goers danced sexually to Christian musicians playing a type of repetitive soft rock beat with militarized church lyrics, such as ‘Army, marching, warfare, battle, victory, etc.’

These disguised abortion preachers even entered the sacred Protestant spaces of Southern Baptist churches. For the first time in its religious history, the Roman Catholic Church forged a strong political alliance with its most hated rivals – the heretics, under the common single issue of abortion. History has always been so absurd.

The anti-abortion evangelists successfully mobilized these hurting people, or ‘heretics,’ into joining the crusade against abortion in America. In the beginning of the crusade, the main groups against abortion in America were political committees formed through the US Catholic Bishop’s Conference.

Suddenly, a populist-fascist social movement had conceived its nativity on the American political scene. Even former pro-choice Republicans, such as the Reagan successor, President Bush, joined the crusade. All of a sudden, angry activists were attacking, confronting and surrounding women’s health centers across the States, and then in the early 90s, the movement resorted to the common tactics of religious fanatics through murdering doctors and health providers across the country. A homegrown political terrorist net birthed, but America’s political police, the FBI, refused to take down the movement. A certain element of America’s political and intelligence elites had a big stake in the anti-abortion assemblage.

But the six laws of history had to come into play, and the Roman Catholic Church failed to understand the cultural blocks that had formed within the United States up to that time. American women had already achieved substantial power in society through fighting two previous waves of feminist agitation. Many American women had already attained important career and lifestyle choices in their lives, and they were not going to give up their hard-won privileges due to some anti-women, anti-abortion, anti-contraception religious fanatics.

America’s Women organizations countered the movement through fully allying with the Democratic party and mobilizing, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of citizens to annually march on D.C., something the anti-abortionists could not do. Some political elites in Washington stood aghast. Their sick plans of ‘national salvation and resurgence’ met a strong political counterforce.

The Republican Party countered with their Convention of 1992, which featured speeches of selected religious fanatics and fascists in order to scare the opposition. It did just the opposite. They looked quite bad on TV. The conservative Southern Democrat, Clinton, seized on the scare and placed himself into the political center. He won the presidency and all of a sudden, the federal government changed its tolerant policy with the populist-fascists, while they began to hunt the most extreme terrorists inside of the anti-abortion crusade.

The populist-fascist crusaders attacked President Clinton mercilessly through the press. But the president was also an expert killer like the ones that preceded him. He had the US government exterminate the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco as a warning and a lesson to the defiant holdouts in the Movement. It worked.

Abortion stayed legal in the US, even with a Supreme Court that had a Catholic majority. The Mormons decided to bolt from the anti-abortion alliance and leave it to the Catholic Church and the rattled Evangelicals. And then ‘Mala Fortuna,’ or Bad Fortune, stabbed the Catholic Church in the foot. Media headlines exposed to the public that the Catholic Church had protected pedophile priests and perverts within its ranks. The public exposure of such crimes permanently damaged the reputation of the Catholic Church in American culture. The Roman Catholic Church would never be able to return to its short glory that it possessed during the 80s and 90s.

The mobilization did work in intimidating many doctors from performing abortions. Now, it is difficult to find abortion providers in many parts of the States. But there also exists the abortion pill that does not require surgical procedures.

This anti-abortion movement has kept up the protests, but it could not seize the state in order to complete its extermination of the ‘evil ones.’ It achieved a stalemate. A hundred years earlier in France, it lost.

In Spain however, during the 1930s, it won. The Spanish populist-fascist movement won because it had the backing of foreign intervention: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the secret support of the British and American governments.

For us Anarchists, this modern political story can help us recognize the political environments that encourage these movements, how they mobilize, and how we can ultimately help destroy them.

Populist-fascist social movements lose when a more powerful alliance of institutions and the people reject their plans. They stalemate or tie when they meet equally powerful social-cultural-political mobilizations. They win when they have the outside support of powerful foreign governments.

Germany could never shake itself from the trauma of the First World War. The year was 1930, and even though Jazz clubs and racy nightlife augmented in Berlin during the latter parts of the Twenties, the Great Depression steamrolled over all of the capitalist nations of Europe. Stories of children starving to death again reached German ears.

The ‘western’ propaganda machine still fulminated that Germany was responsible for all of the evils of the war. Why was there no mention of the French Empire or the British Empire that controlled almost a quarter of the world’s surface? All of this Allied war propaganda was untrue, and French troops still occupied the Ruhr region. The failed and twice failed, and even thrice failed, Weimar Republic coalition governments, still had to pay ‘reparations,’ or extortion monies to Britain, France and the United States. Germany won on the eastern front in WW I, and of course, there were no reparations towards Russia. The hypocrisy and lies never ceased.

The National Socialists, or the Nazis, could also see that the Socialists or really, the ‘Social Democrats-Leftists-Reformists’ in the Weimar government were pathetic, and most Germans had gotten quite sick of their cowardice and lack of direction. They were no different from the right-wing, militarist madmen that just wanted to wield power. The Nazis main rivals, the Communists, and at that time, the strongest Communist Party outside of Russia, were still split and battle-scarred from the defeated 1918 Spartacist Revolutions in both Berlin and in Munich. The other political opposition was the Center Party, or the ‘Zentrum,’ which represented German Catholicism.

The Nazi Party began to jump onto and embrace the most recent political changes. Instead of watching on the sidelines like a small splinter party within the fringes of political discussions, it began to make the strategic moves, stir its own news, and form its own political coalitions. From a radical fringe of southern German reactionaries that tried to create a Bavarian separatist-fascist state during the 1920s, the Nazi Party transformed itself into a German revolutionary party, while utilizing both street violence and secret party coalitions in order to construct its national transformation.

It successfully moved from the War of Position to the War of Maneuver. Or as a contemporary political scientist and Italian Communist under house arrest, Antonio Gramsci, had stated: the party successfully creates the counter hegemony to counterattack the state hegemony.

Hegemony is not about domination. I continue to read both Leftist and Libertarian writers that refer to hegemony as a type of political-imperial oppression over the weak and subjugated, with statements such as, ‘the weakness or power of American hegemony.’ These intellectuals forget that hegemony, as previously explained by Antonio Gramsci, is actually a cultural practice of understanding the world and doing something about it.

Within our modern existence, and where most of us command caged lives inside violent, industrialized cities, we ourselves form our own ideas about our environs, initiate discussions with like minded friends, join political or cultural associations, and even make our own political alliances or choices.

People construct their own worldviews, shape their own realities, and create their own cultures. Whether it is a particular religious worship, hanging out with a certain subculture of fashion and music, or even attending a political demonstration, people themselves make their own history. History is not just battles, presidents and laws; it also represents everyday humanity creating their own cultural expressions, temporary communities, or hegemonies, in order to comprehend the world around them.

Most humans are not dupes as some Leftists commentators like to rattle about incessantly. We are all philosophers in our very own individualistic ways. The Tea Party Conservatives were not the willing idiots of the Koch Brothers either, as some Democratic party hacks have ranted about recently. If there was no national anger already swelling about seeing their proud country decay into a Third World disaster, yet possessing the most violent empire in world history, then no amount of Koch brother money would have been able to set up their public protests.

For us Anarchists, this means that we also have to embrace the times and places that we both live in and suffer from. A few intelligent Americans are waking up to the American nightmare that fogs over people’s lives, bodies, minds and emotions. Most citizens are too scared to fight, and we should leave them alone. But other angry and confused citizens are struggling out there. They want to hear another story besides the trite and pathetic lies vomiting out of the corporate news media and crap American television. We Anarchists have that other story. We do not need to form a cohesive political party like our Communist sect enemies, nor do we need to seize power, like some military officer caste; instead, we must have the courage to speak the truth when people ask, or when they complain to us about the way things are going politically.

I will continue my story on how the ultra-nationalist and reactionary Nazis became a national-revolutionary German party. When the Weimar state cowards and liars tried to push a bogus national referendum on making partial reparation payments, the Nazis rejected the vote fraud completely. Modern Germans did not like bullshit, and still do not like such games. Continue with your previous work or fight. The Nazis understood completely. Meanwhile, the National Socialists continued to incite even bloodier street fights against Communists and supposed collaborators with foreign occupying troops on German soil. They also began to move into other directions, such as fomenting the necessary political alliances, and often-contradictory ones.

Soon, the Nazis made overtures to particular German business owners and small business owners, or good capitalists that they liked. They successfully sloganeered that the problems of reparations and war guilt on Germany had destroyed business and opportunities in their own land. Meanwhile, the party press kept blabbering the anti-Semitic cant about manipulative Jewish stock jobbers turning the world capitalist economy upside down. The Nazis also played down their nationalist-class conflict patter.

Then, the National Socialists made overtures to the Prussian military caste, or the German military. This political alliance was not hard because the Nazis had the same desire for a continuation of war hostilities like the German high command. The Nazis even won some political positions inside a few regional governments.

With all of the street gang methods and political maneuvers towards the other gravitational pulls of power, the Nazis were still another right-wing political party moving on the national front. Their main base was Bavaria, which was the center of the German reaction and a very Catholic region. Finally, the Nazis made the right openings to the Catholic Church, and to its political appendage in Germany, the Zentrum.

Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party and not the most observant Catholic, arranged a meeting with the papal nuncio in Berlin, a man by the name of Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII during World War II. Right before the elections of 1933, the two parties, both the Zentrum and the Nazis united to form the strongest coalition party in Germany. The Nazi Party started ranting about the ‘destruction of the German family and defending real family values.’ The same year, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as his chancellor. The rest is history.

Hegemony also works repeatedly in the United States. The Republican-Democrat deception is a perfect case to analyze. The two parties simply pick and choose their new ‘political alliances’ depending on what gets the election results. First, there is the Democratic ‘base,’ which tries to include both large, and small business owners, both labor union bosses and workers with union seniority. Meanwhile, it makes overtures to middle class African-Americans and to certain Latino populations, such as second generation Mexican Americans. The Dems do not stop there, but also seek alliances with certain socio-economic ethnic groups, such as urban Asian Americans that despise lazy state spongers, wealthy Jewish-American, Israel First supporters living in large urban cities, and college educated, yuppie hipsters. This contradictory hodge-podge also hopes to attract Conservative farm and rust belt workers and senior citizens feeling insecure about Social Security, and next, urban Gay and Lesbian populations.

The Republicans also have their absurd political concoctions. They have attempted to organize Christian Evangelicals that want a Christian Republic, and yet the Repubs attract freethinking Libertarians in the western states wanting the government out of their lives. This political assemblage has the support of the ‘Don’t tread on me’ gun-Bible belt in the South, Mormons in the West, and large farmers in parts of New England. The party also contains a bunch of law and order followers calling for tougher laws, more prisons and more police, including staunch militarists, all of whom believe that the government has the sole right to bear arms – and to use them when it damn well feels like it. The party aims for the support of both business owners that live in gated communities and a few racist rednecks that live in trailer parks, and it hits on certain ethnic groups, such as Cuban Americans. If a historian were to examine the hegemonic alliances of both parties a hundred years earlier, in 1912, he or she would find very different and contradictory political bases on both aisles.

As long as there exists human civilization and urbanization, hegemony lives around us. We create our own culture, our own histories, and so therefore, we make up hegemonies, or our own political frameworks, even with all of their internal inconsistencies and absurdities.

We Anarchists have the easiest work load, unlike the other political party hacks and slaves out there hustling their weird ideologies and crap literature. Our destiny, or ‘Fortuna,’ takes some courage to act upon. Just bravely speak up or write the truth to power.